


A Ticking Heartbeat

by chronologicalimplosion



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Alternate Universe - Magic, F/M, Magical Accidents
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-27
Updated: 2014-03-27
Packaged: 2018-01-17 04:59:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,951
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1374700
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chronologicalimplosion/pseuds/chronologicalimplosion
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jade was being taught magic by her eccentric old grandfather, while Dave lived nearby under the tutelage of an incredibly strict clockmaker who made expansive and intricate masterpieces. She joked once that she was only friends with him because she wanted a test subject for all her experimental magic.</p>
<p>He’d never, y’know, thought that that might eventually happen.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Ticking Heartbeat

**Author's Note:**

  * For [meoqie](https://archiveofourown.org/users/meoqie/gifts).



> Written for cyanSonata for jadefest 2014! The prompt I filled was broadly asking for anything Dave/Jade or Davesprite/Jade, so I used it as an excuse to write an AU. I don't have a lot of the details for this world fleshed out in my head (I usually do), so... y'know, use your imagination. It could be very light steampunk, an earlier version of the idea formed as a Night Circus AU. Despite that, though, I think I'm pretty happy with it. (Especially since it was a pinch hit and I procrastinated it even further than it had been to start with.)
> 
> I hope you like it!

Dave wound the key for as long as he could make the dramatic tension linger, a smug bastard of a smile on his face. Jade rolled her eyes and told him to get on with it already, but she was bouncing up and down on her toes. He knew he had her ensnared in his web of clockwork spiders. Or… well. This one was a bird. Nest of clockwork birds? No, Strider, bugs don’t get trapped in nests… and why is Jade a bug? Nevermind, forget the metaphor. It never happened.

He set the bird down on the table and it whirred to life, first flapping its wings a few times and then opening its mouth to the sky to let out a little clicking birdsong. It hopped awkwardly across the table in Jade’s direction (he’d set it down so it’d move her way, smooth as silk) and even did a little flip.

His one-woman audience was completely enraptured for all of thirty seconds, and then the smile started to break across her face. It wasn’t the kind of smile you wanted to see when you were showing her something; that smile wasn’t impressed. That was the “I like it, but…” smile. The “it’s a good start” smile. It was the but that killed your presentation, every time.

“Neat, Dave! You built this yourself?”

“Hell yeah I did! Sure as hell didn’t just hatch out of a metal egg. These fingers right here breathed some life into all this cold metal.”

“Well I don’t know about life…” The bird was slowing down on the table, grinding slowly and haltingly to a stop. Then Jade smiled at it and the movement changed, started to move still more like a real bird. It flapped its wings and started to fly into the air, buzzing around both of their heads and then letting out a few ringing chirps before landing on top of Dave’s head.

“This thing isn’t gonna take some magical metal bird shit on my perfectly-coifed hair, is it? Tell me the truth, Jade, am I going to have to start looking up how to get the smell of bird deuce out of hair? Am I going to have to shave all of my beautiful locks because you just didn’t know when to let the clockwork bird go unwitched?”

Jade giggled and the bird fluttered back down from his head to the table, very definitely trying to graze his nose with its tail feathers. “Ugh, Dave, that’s gross. You know I can’t just make something out of nothing! What, did you build bird crap into the design? Was that going to be the grand finale?”

The metal bird on the table was now broken, Dave knew, a useless pile of gears that had all ground against each other in the wrong way and all out of place during the pretty little show Jade had made it put on. He didn’t say anything.

She did this a lot.  
***  
Jade was being taught magic by her eccentric old grandfather, while Dave lived nearby under the tutelage of an incredibly strict clockmaker who made expansive and intricate masterpieces. He was known for his grandfather clocks, plain, sturdy, and traditional, but Dave didn’t care much about the big wooden timepieces. He liked to make things that seemed alive with the clockwork, and his tutor seemed to be almost magical in the contraptions and creatures he could make out of gears.

They were about the same age, had grown up together when their daily tasks were still limited to chores and running into the city square to pick up scrap metal or… well, the things Jade picked up from the market tended to be less conventional and less predictable. He had given up asking why her granddad wanted any of it a long time ago; the explanations were always way over his head. He just postulated out loud and jokingly made fun of them, usually painting a picture of folk tale witches, the scary kind, in wide and sweeping brushstrokes. Stealing children away, making potions out of weird concoctions of organs and other stuff nobody wants. Over time, she corrected him less and played along more. She joked once that she was only friends with him because she wanted a test subject for all her experimental magic.

He’d never, y’know, thought that that might eventually happen.  
****  
“Hold still, Dave!”

“Okay, just… run me through this again. I’m trying my best to convince my knees that I’m not doing to grow a third leg out my ass, but they just keep knocking. Knocking at the door, pounding, trying to get away from the crazy serial killer with the extra leg she’s going to sew onto my poor backside. How am I supposed to sit with a butt-leg, Jade? I will never be comfortable again.”

“Dave!”

“Right. Sorry. But you promise? No butt-legs?”

“Yes, Dave, I promise I won’t accidentally give you an ass-leg by making you fly! God, it’s like you don’t understand magic at all!” She huffed at him, her face screwed up in concentration, and Dave realized with chagrin that he had finally become the target of the long-maligned “I like it, but” smile. Jade Harley liked modest clockmaker’s apprentice Dave, but it wasn’t good enough anymore. He didn’t understand magic and he couldn’t fly and she was determined to change the easier of those two.

He closed his eyes.

In the span before he opened them, his world got a whole lot weirder.

There was a gasp from his trusted partner-in-crime.

“Jade, my back feels funny.” He scrunched his vaguely itchy nose. “Jade?”

“Oh my god, that’s not what’s supposed to happen.”

Dave’s eyes snapped open. “What’s not supposed to happen?”

“Don’t worry! I can fix it!”  
***  
The good news was that, in a way, it sort of worked. Dave could, in fact, fly.

The bad news was that he’d become significantly more birdish.  
***  
When Jade finally came out, she was dragging her feet and she looked a lot more sheepish than he’d ever seen her before. She’d always been full of confidence, all answers, no fear. Now… he realized that she’d likely never had to really put her mind to fixing a mistake this big before. He always cleaned up after her little clockwork demonstrations. And… she might have gotten in over her head, a bit.

Maybe he shouldn’t have trusted her with his life quite so literally.

She plopped down next to him on the ground, biting her lip. “Well… y’know the weird-looking dog that’s been hanging around a lot more lately?”

Dave didn’t see where this was going. “...Yes?”

Jade sighed. “That’s my granddad.”

Dave blinked at his best friend. “Man, your grandmother was into some fucked-up shit.”

“Ew! God, no, Dave! Just. Quit it!” She pulled a face, and after a long moment it smoothed back into her previous tormented frustration. “I mean that my granddad fused his soul to the dog. He’s trapped. We haven’t been able to figure out how to undo it. And… we haven’t had much luck. So I don’t know if we’ll have much luck getting you back to normal any time soon, either.”

The pause was like a long hesitation between movements of clockwork, like one part of the mechanism ticking slowly towards the tipping point where it would move another piece, but in the meantime, all appeared still from the outside. Then, it reached the end of its arc, and the movement all at once. “Wait, are you telling me that I might be stuck as a goddamn bird?” The feathers covering much of his upper body bristled, and his wings twitched. He didn’t quite have the handle of moving them intentionally yet (god, he had to include a _yet_ ), but moving them as part of an expression seemed strangely natural, fluid.

Jade looked at her hands and very much not at Dave. “I… yeah. You might be sort of orange and birdish for a while.”  
***  
Dave didn’t see Jade for a couple of days. He was halfway avoiding her, and the rest of the way he was pretty sure she was avoiding him.

He spent a lot of time staring at himself in the mirror. There was a pronounced puff of feathers around his neck, something in-between a feather boa and the proud chest of a robin or a sparrow. They were an orange-juice-mixed-with-cream color, as were the scattered feathers that tapered off down his arms and his chest. Then there were the wings. Huge, awkward things jutting out of his back, twice as wide as his arm span and impossible to tuck away in any reasonable manner.

He spent a lot of time feeling the back of his neck where the feathers around his neck faded into his hair and vice versa. More than anything else, it seemed to give form to the conflicted and confusing feelings he had about the whole matter.  
***  
There was a knock on his window one evening and his feathered all stood up at the sound. He turned his head slowly, and when he looked, he saw a very pouty Jade. “Dave! Dave, let me in!”

It occurred to him that just because he was only halfway avoiding Jade didn’t mean he wasn’t avoiding everyone in general more than enough to make up for the other half.

Slowly, though, he stood up and went to unlatch the window.

Jade climbed in and then pulled a bucket of water and some towels in behind her. Before Dave could ask what was up, Jade told him to sit, which he did, slightly dumbstruck.

She produced a wet sponge from the bucket and started to run it along his feathery parts, after bunching towels around the base of the chair. It felt a lot nicer than he would’ve expected. She was gentle and he hadn’t had any reference point to go by, but his newly-feathery bits felt a lot better with the tiny rivulets running between them. They’d started to get sort of oily and clumped together.

Jade was silent for a while, just working silently, and then she took a deep breath and began, “Sorry, Dave. I sorta thought I could do anything, I guess. I just. I’ve got magic in my veins, and I wanted to think I could do anything. I was just really excited about the prospect of helping you fly, and. I wasn’t ready. This is all my fault and I still can’t fix it and I’m sorry.”

“So… what’s all this, then?”

Jade laughed, sort of, but the sound was hollow and very un-Jade-like. “I’ve been reading a lot about birds. They need to do certain things to take care of themselves. Water baths, preening. I figured you might not have known what to do, and… I kinda came on a hunch.”

He looked back at Jade over his shoulder. “So this is your version of a peace offering?”

She smiled sheepishly. “...yeah?”

Dave was done with pregnant pauses and long silences. He didn’t have time for that; he smiled slyly right away. “Well, if you were going to apologize by getting a cute girl to give me a sponge bath, you probably could’ve found a cuter girl…”

“Dave!”  
***  
She’d figure it out eventually, he knew. She didn’t just give up on things once she got started. It was really just a matter of time, and he figured there wasn’t any point in punishing her in the meantime.

Plus, in a way, it had worked. After a few weeks as bird-Dave, he finally got the hang of flying. And maybe he wasn’t in such a huge hurry to get back to normal after all.


End file.
